


The shadow of solace

by sdlucly



Series: The Pancake Mix [3]
Category: The OC (TV)
Genre: Future Fic, M/M, Ryan being himself, Seth trying his best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-09-02 19:06:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16792939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sdlucly/pseuds/sdlucly
Summary: Providence weather doesn't let up





	The shadow of solace

Providence weather doesn't let up, never mind that it's March and the weather channel had said it'd be at the very least sunny. Sunny my ass, it was raining like there was no tomorrow, like it was the end of the world. It was raining like _The Day After Tomorrow_ and _2012_ combined.

Seth snorts, hurrying his way down the street and into the building for his first Monday class. He raises the collar of his jacket and pulls the wool scarf tighter around his neck. He stands there for a second, looking up at the wide doors before taking a step inside.

He takes in a deep breath of the scarf, warm and thick around him. It was a present from Ryan. Seth found it in the mail the morning of his birthday, last December. He's rarely without it on the coldest days. For a second, Seth thinks it smells like oranges and the ocean, like Ryan, but it only smells like Seth himself.

Okay, so he'd thought a visit to Berkeley would, maybe not fix everything, but at least something. Something. Be a start, the beginning of the...something, whatever. Anything, really.

Again, could not have been more wrong.

He sits down in a corner chair, stares down at his satchel on top of the desk. So it helped... very, very little. Almost nothing. Practically insignificant. But that doesn't mean it can't be fixed.

Seth thinks about it for a second. In two months he'll finish his third year of college. So it'll be three years since he really spent some time with Ryan, because that summer after freshmen year, Seth had stayed here in Providence. Lara had found the two of them a small paying job in a publisher, coloring children's book, and the pay had totally sucked, but it had been something to do instead of going back home. And last summer he had found another coloring job in a better publisher, and the money had been marginally better but not so much. But it had been fun, and Seth had been all about the fun back then and this summer...

This summer.

Lara sits by his side and nudges him, and Seth looks up at her, blinks, for a second not knowing what to tell her.

"So, how was your weekend?"

Seth opens his mouth but doesn't know what to say. I hate Matthew, he wants to say, but it's stupid and spiteful and yet he hates the guy with everything he has because...

Because.

Jennifer sits on Lara's other side and groans and Seth blinks down at his satchel, taking his laptop out absently. He stares at it even as the teacher walks in, and Lara and Jennifer start talking out their notes and laptops as well.

He can fix this, he keeps thinking, the one thought running through his brain, the same one he clung to Saturday night as he had his back to Ryan, the one that he tried to keep in mind on the seven hour flight back to Providence yesterday morning. 

Yes, there's this... this rift between Ryan and him. There's this space between the two of them that wasn't there before. And he knows it's not the 3000 miles in between, but him. Him, who rarely emailed, who almost never called. It's his fault, because he wasn't there. He wasn't even...

"Seth?"

It's Jennifer and he can talk with her later but he has to do this now. He has to do this now before he loses his nerve.

He starts his laptop and clicks on his email without a second thought.

_To:_

Easy.

He pauses, and for a moment he can't remember Ryan's email.

He can't remember Ryan's email.

And he can't remember Ryan's email because _he doesn't know Ryan's email._

Seth closes his eyes briefly, doesn't hear Jennifer start talking notes even as Lara nudges him. He laughs self deprecatingly, a painful sound in his throat.

_He doesn't know Ryan's email._

No wonder things are so fucked up between them. What the hell is wrong with him? No wonder they are doing the sibling thing, when one asks how the other is without really caring about the answer.

The teacher is speaking but Seth couldn't have cared less. He starts to freak out as silently as he can, doing search in Outlook. He starts with Ryan and doesn't find anything. Goes through Atwood and still nothing. Even searches for Berkeley and turns out he somehow has a Berkeley email that's not Ryan and who the hell does he know in Berkeley that's not Ryan, anyway?

He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.

"Seth, what the hell are you doing?"

He doesn't pay attention to Lara or Jennifer. Nothing is as important as him finding Ryan's email.

Okay, deep breath. Deep breath. Yes, good. He types in Ryan Atwood in the search box and this time it says:

Ryan-atwood@berkeleycollege.edu  
Subject: Hey, there

Seth grimaces, bites on his lower lip.

The date of that email is of August of 2007. The first time Ryan sent him an email. There's Seth's answer, from October of 2007.

It took him two months to answer Ryan? Oh, God. There's another email from Ryan, the day after Seth's answer. And after that... Nothing. No answer to that email. Seth never answered.

He covers his eyes with his left hand, coldness spreading in his chest. _Fuck._

After the longest time, he clicks on REPLY.

_To:_

At least now he knows the address. 

_Subject:_

Seth stares at the blinking cursor, at a loss of words, for once. For once. He goes with what he knows, what is familiar to him.

Subject: Hey.

He clicks on the message body, and lets his fingers do the talking for once.

_Ryan,_

_Hey, what's up? How's the beginning of the week for you? Is it as cold in Berkeley as it is here? It says 3 degrees in the sidebar, but I don't believe a word that thing says. It's at least negative. At least._

_Hope to hear from you soon,_

_Seth._

He clicks send before he can think twice about it.

"Seth?"

Seth doesn't answer, taking in a deep breath and letting out slowly. Every journey begins with a single step, right?

*****

By the end of Seth's three hour class, Ryan hasn't answered. Not that Seth's checking. Of course.

_Of course._

But. Still. No answer. So, yeah. No answer.

*****

He goes to lunch with Lara and Luigi and Jennifer and Amanda. They laugh and horse around and he does not keep checking on his email through his cell phone.

He does not. No, really. And if he were... _if he were..._ well, then he might have noticed that there's no answer.

Not that he's checking. Because, you know, he's not.

*****

Seth thinks he's checking his cell phone rather stealthy, but then again his parents never really cared where we went as long as he left his comics and his Nintendo at the house, and he never had any brothers or sisters growing up, so stealth is not really a tool he learned to cultivate. So when it's the middle of the afternoon, and he keeps flipping open his cell phone and clicks on his college account and keeps getting nothing but stupid promotional crap, he can't stop himself from glaring at it. 

Lara asks him about it, once, and he shrugs it off. Jennifer pokes him on the side and asks, and he turns to glare at her. Amanda doesn't ask.

*****

As they are leaving their 7pm, two hour class, for their respective apartments, they don't ask.

Seth bites his lower lip, tightens the scarf round his neck and shoves his gloved hands into his pockets.

The wind is chilling against his exposed face, and his chest grows cold by the second, only it has nothing to do with the weather.

*****

Tuesday he doesn't check, only that he does, and there is still no answer.

He doesn't bite his nails or the skin under but it's a close call.

The girls don't ask him about the phone. He can tell they want to, they really, really want to, but something on his face must say, very loud and very clear, to back off. And they do.

*****

Wednesday sucks ass and it should crawl away and die.

No, really.

He's not joking.

*****

Thursday...

Okay, he might be starting to lose it by Thursday...

Not that he's, you know, CHECKING or anything. Not that he's waiting for an email. Not that it feels like he's been sucker punched and dangled upside and left to rot in the middle of the beach under the lights of a party going in a beach house.

Because, well, he's not. Not really.

*****

Friday he has two papers to give in, and two classes on top of that, so he tells himself that of course he's not going to check. Of course. And he kinda doesn't.

He tells himself that he'll check before going to bed and so when he sees the email waiting for him (because Ryan has to have answered by then, there is just no way around it) he can be happy and pleased. A treat waiting for him, in a way.

And Seth keeps his promise because he doesn't check his email, no matter how much he wants to. And when he gets home, he says hi to Jennifer who totally beat him to the apartment, even though he had the earlier class.

He makes his way to his bedroom, and watches TV for an hour, mostly just killing time. And finally, when he opens his laptop and clicks on Outlook, he does it with his breath in his throat, with his chest cold with anticipation.

It's gotta be there, he thinks, tells himself. It's been days, four days, Ryan has to--

There's an email from Lara and two from classes and...

Nothing else.

Seth snorts, slams the laptop closed. His face is in a grimace and he knows it's his fault, in a way, the whole never reaching out, the whole not returning emails and phone calls. But he's doing it now. He's doing it now, _damn it._

Seth crawls into bed afterwards, tries his best not to think about Ryan and the Newport house, about afternoons spent down by the pier, nights filled with Playstation championships, and the two of them crawling onto the futon when the sun is about to break through the night.

It takes him forever to fall asleep.

*****

Seth doesn't find an answer waiting for him in his email account until Tuesday afternoon of the next week. It took Ryan eight days and a few hours to answer an email.

Seth knows Ryan is not resentful and vindictive, knows that if Ryan didn't answer before now it was because he was busy, because he probably said, "I'll answer in a minute" and then forgot about it. He knows, otherwise the coldness in his chest might indicate something else, something besides just feeling neglected, forgotten.

_Seth,  
Berkeley is enjoying one of its 300 sunny days a year. It's warm but not too hot and I get to sit under a tree and write you this.  
I hope you had a good weekend.  
Ryan. _

That's it.

Four lines worth of brotherly love. No question about Seth's subjects, about tests or papers or even friends. Does Ryan know the name of his friends? Hell, does Seth know the names of Ryan's friends for that matter?

Did he have any idea Ryan had been dating a senior guy for three whole months before he'd ended up on Ryan's door about to knock? No, he hadn't, and whose fault is that?

There's no hand reaching out for him in that email, no desire to know more than what was offered in the previous one, which was very close to nothing. Ryan has no need to know about Seth's subjects.

Seth moves the mouse over REPLY button but pauses. What's the point, anyway? There's only so much reaching out one can do while being on the other side of the country. Ryan has no need to know more about Seth's life, and Seth's pained to say, that he probably doesn't even want to.

Seth closes the laptop with his hand, looks up at his friends sitting around him in the library. He stares down at his hand, still curled around the edge of his computer. Maybe there is a river wide enough for one to be unable to cross it.


End file.
